Hi friends,

As we approach the end of the year, we want to share appreciation for the people and organizations who have inspired us. Here is a message of gratitude to some of the folks we have encountered and learned from this year.

From the road trips around California...

Aaron teaching at CA Tech Fest

• Jasmine, David, and the good folks at Fresno Barrios Unidos work passionately to organize for families in the Central Valley. They show us how to have conversations online and offline about community health and reproductive justice for families and youth. Take action to help with their vital grassroots efforts.
  
  
• At UC Santa Cruz, the Everett Program trains undergraduate students to build technology capacity with nonprofit organizations. Katie, Thomas, JC, and their students drive service learning at the intersection of technology and social justice. They recently developed their College Mentor app to increase educational accessibility.
  
  
• Earlier this year, Manny and David from the East L.A. Youth Institute brought their video making skills and leadership to our CA Nonprofit Technology Festival in Los Angeles. They dedicated their energy to create a workshop on media production for young people. Watch this video made by Shamar during that workshop.

When exploring the country...

Palante folks at Allied Media Conference

• At the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, I learned ways to support digital security for activists with Jamila and our own board member Jack, from the Palante Technology Cooperative. Palante Tech does critical work to support activists' technology needs. Explore ways to work with them.


• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been on on the front lines of digital rights for decades. This year, they released their Privacy Badger to block spying ads and invisible trackers in your web browser, and helped launch Let's Encrypt to provide a free way to host more secure web sites. And anyone wanting to practice safer online communications should check out their Surveillance Self-Defense guide.

To sailing beyond our shores...

Michelle and Dianna at MozFest

• Early in spring, we collaborated with our good friend Dirk from FabRiders to facilitate Open Cambodia 2014 in Sihanoukville. It was truly inspiring to work with the good people of the Open Institute and to participate alongside 100 folks working in the health, trafficking, migration, and human rights sectors. Discover what was shared at Open Cambodia this year in Dirk's blog.

• We are big fans of the whole Mozilla Foundation crew from the fifth Mozilla Festival, in London. We received irreplaceable wisdom from Michelle, Sarah, and Amira in working together across time zones to make MozFest happen. You can help Mozilla in their mission to create, protect, and teach the open web through these 9 different ways to be a Webmaker.


• Privacy and anonymity have been at the forefront of many conversations in 2014, and we are amazed by the great work being done by projects like Tor, Guardian Project, Open Whisper Systems, and Benetech. Their free and open source tools, which provide a range of encryption and anonymity capabilities, are setting the bar higher in terms of what is possible when it comes to protecting human rights activists and empowering more secure communications. And we couldn't be bigger fans of the research and revelations coming out of Citizen Lab every month. We hope we get spend lots more time with all of them in 2015.

and back home...

It is a joy to work alongside the passion, humor, and kindness of the folks in our humble abode in San Francisco. Here's a shout out to Josh, Gunner, Ruth, and Javier of Aspiration, and to the beautiful people of Upwell, The Ruckus Society, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Thank you for being the folks who inspire me to keep on keeping on every day

Happy Holidays to You

If you are in the Bay Area tomorrow, you are invited to our holiday party at our S.F. Nonprofit Tech Center on the evening of December 17th to celebrate a year of growth and new horizons.

And thank YOU for being part of our family. We look forward to collaborating with you in 2015.

Sincerely,
Misty